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The Psychoanalytic Interpretations of the Resurrection Accounts.

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 The Psychoanalytic Implications of The Resurrection Accounts
Amanda C. Atkinson
Delivered at the international meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature at King’s College in
London, 6 July 2011.

The Psycho-historical Relevance of the Resurrection Appearances

There are acute historical and theological difficulties in establishing the reality of the
risen Christ; the historical validity of the resurrection of Jesus is an aporia at best. Two centuries
of scholarly research both affirming and denying the literal, bodily resurrection have yet to be
reconciled.1 This incessant debate seems only to provide more evidence that the pursuit of the
resurrection as an empirical, historical reality is a difficult and complex venture. That which can
be affirmed is not necessarily the physical resurrection itself but the reaction of the disciples: the
spectators’ individual transformation through the reported experiences in the gospel texts and the
Acts of the Apostles. Given the limited reliability of available sources, how then do we
determine the nature of the disciples’ experience of the risen Christ? Psychological approaches to
religion began formal considerations of this question in the 1880s. A scholarly dissatisfaction
with the historicity of Christ’s resurrection influenced the nascent field of human psychology to
attempt the inference of motive and relative perception from the visions of the biblical authors.2
The logic of Sigmund Freud gave credence to religious belief as an appropriate subtopic of
psychology, and though he often confined it to be no more than a vehicle for wish fulfillment, his
desire to rigorously authenticate historical belief with contemporary reason was novel:
If all the evidence put forward for the authenticity of religious teachings originates in the
past, it is natural to look round and see whether the present, about which it is easier to
form judgments, may not also be able to furnish evidence of the sort. If by this means we
could succeed in clearing even a single portion of the religious system from doubt, the
whole of it gains enormously in credibility.3

                                                                                                               
1
Pieter F. Craffert, “Jesus’ Resurrection in a Social-Scientific Perspective: Is There Anything
New to be Said?” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 7 (2009): 126-127.
2
Margaret G. Alter, Resurrection Psychology: An Understanding of Human Personality Based
on the Life and Teachings of Jesus (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1994), xviii.
3
Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 34.
Freud’s ambivalence is nevertheless a microcosm of the current dispute between the historians
and the psychologists of religion. Those within the field of psychoanalysis believe a more
reliable approach “will be found if we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious
ideas.”4
For those favoring the historical method, the writings of Paul are considered
representative of the earliest Resurrection accounts. For the apostle and his audience, the
visionary experiences of the Messiah were considered a legitimate witness for Jesus’ bodily
resurrection.5 Critical historians like Norman Perrin find Paul to be “the one witness we have
whom we can interrogate about his claim to have seen Jesus risen, and our assumption has to be
that if we could interrogate the other witnesses their claims would be similar to his.”6 It seems
many New Testament historical scholars unearth more psychological truth in the resurrection
accounts than they perhaps intend by responding to the motives and purposes of the gospel
authors themselves; to ask, ‘What are the evangelists trying to say?’ is to divulge their thoughts
and their conscious and unconscious intents. Although the goal of the historian is to construe the
past in terms of its contrast to the present, “before anything else can be achieved, the historian
must try to enter the mental world of those who created the sources.”7 The psychology of the
resurrection accentuates the need to account for the rapid conversion of Jesus’ disciples from
frightened and confused to an unyielding, core church in the time immediately following his
crucifixion.8

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Religious Belief

Though the various exponents of psychoanalytic thought have modified their approaches
to religious belief over the years, the original Freudian teachings indisputably view religion as
human invention for the sake of comfort. Religion, as Freud argued in The Future of an Illusion,

                                                                                                               
4
Ibid., 38.
5
Craffert 2009, 143.
6
Norman Perrin, The Resurrection According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1977), 83.
7
Craffert 2009, 137; for quote, see also John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and
New Directions in the Study of Modern History (London: Longman, 1984), 116.  
8
Christopher Knight, “Resurrection, Religion, and ‘Mere’ Psychology,” International Journal
for Philosophy of Religion 39 (1996): 159.
2  
 
can be briefly described as a sort of “mass obsessional neurosis.”9 He viewed the repetition
present in religious ritual as the same category of action as the compulsions of the neurotic who
must wash his hands, or check his locks, or repeat a phrase for fear of an unknown or
unreasonable consequence. Both the religious man and the neurotic man feel the need to atone
for suppressed guilt – often sexual guilt - through some form of ritualized penance. The concepts
of Heaven or afterlife or, as is relevant here, the final resurrection at the Parousia are but the
product of wish fulfillment. The bleakness of our current existence is too much to accept, Freud
says, and so humankind reassures itself that something good must come as the product of our
compulsions. Freud perceives the great Godhead as the projection of the ultimate Father figure:
all-loving if the patient has a kind earthly father, all-powerful if the patient has a father worth
fearing.
Neither Freud nor Jung, however, develops a formal strategy for Biblical interpretation.
Rather, their collective study of Western literature, Christianity, and a broader cultural scope of
symbol and ritual results in a psychoanalytic paradigm to Biblical concepts.10 The foundational
principle of such an approach is the multi-layered operation of the unconscious, an influencing
factor present in every human undertaking, no less the writing and interpretation of Biblical
texts. There are, at the levels of the evangelist and the reader, the effects of the individual
unconscious, from which personal experience and personality play a significant role.
Psychoanalytic Biblical criticism additionally perceives the effects of the unconscious at the
level of the narrative, in characters seen to have complex personalities and thus able serve as
models of individuation.11 Freud was particularly drawn to the figures of Joseph, Abraham,
Jesus, Paul, and above all to Moses, to whom he dedicated his final and most unusual
publication, Moses and Monotheism. Jung, too, spent considerable time on Adam, Paul, and the
Christ, the latter of which he termed the “exemplification of the archetype of the Self.”12
Character analysis, particularly when employed for the purpose of personal use, suggests the

                                                                                                               
9
Arthur Guirdham, Christ & Freud: A Study of Religious Experience and Observance (London:
George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1961), 18.
10
Wayne G. Rollins, “Freud and Jung,” Psychological Approaches to the Bible, eds. Wayne G.
Rollins & D. Andrew Kille (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
2007), 43.
11
Wayne G. Rollins, Soul and Psyche: The Bible in Psychological Perspective (Minneapolis,
MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1999), 56.
12
Rollins 2007, 45-46.
3  
 
inherent pathogenic and therapeutic ends contained in Scripture. Jung’s own inclinations tended
toward the therapeutic, where the goal of Biblical textual study is in gaining a greater
understanding of the Self; as Wayne Rollins so describes it, the primary Jungian purpose of
religion is in “the care and cure of souls.”13 Freud’s preoccupation with the darkest elements of
the psyche focused his attention on the capacity of Biblical texts to damage and coerce. In this,
Freud’s position is not necessarily inappropriate. It is the responsibility of the psychologist of
religion to maintain a critical view of any text so deeply enmeshed in human affairs.
It is critical to note that for Freud, the actual experience of the Divine did not exist except
as illusion, and this was and is considered by some to be his cardinal error.14 Even Jung, for
whom it is difficult to discern his own specific religious belief, willingly admits, “I am well
satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or
divine."15 Unlike Freud, Jung was not averse to speaking descriptively of God. He saw in every
verbal and visual rendition of the divine the human attempt to probe the holy and hidden parts of
existence. It was his intention to reveal these ‘soul-truths’ latent in the rites, creeds, and
scriptures of religion that he considered long since suppressed and forgotten.

Myth as Vehicle for Meaning

The 20th century anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski recognizes the persistent human
response to explore the meaning of life through story. Narrative is an essential and sacred
component to the rituals, ethics, and social structure of a society – the representative of a
primordial and more authentic reality with which to evaluate the present world. This is the
function of the type of story called ‘myth’ – not a synonym for ‘fiction’, but a story that is
infinitely true in meaning, if not literally true or provable in fact. Mythology, as Jung describes,
is but a “living religion.”16 It is quite similar in function to Lewis and Tolkien’s notion of the
‘fairy story’, a form with the power “to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in
palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off
                                                                                                               
13
Ibid., 47.  
14
Guirdham 1961, 19. See also Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York, NY: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1973), 256-257.
15
C. G. Jung, “Jung and Religious Belief: Questions to Jung and His Answers,” Psychology and
Western Religion, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 260.
16
C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious: Collected Works IX (I), trans. R.
F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 154.
4  
 
irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and
thus, instead of ‘commenting on life’, can add to it.”17 Even to the historian of religion, Mircea
Eliade, myth is more than mere truism, but, “beyond that, a story that is a most precious
possession because it is sacred, exemplary, significant.”18 Despite Jung’s reluctance to approach
the Christian narrative as history, among the prodigious events in the mythos of Christ and the
early church, Jung accounts the resurrection as the most significant.19 Jung believes the use of
‘myth’ and ‘fairy tale’ to be a human effort to express and come to terms with unconscious
processes. Through the retelling of stories, ‘buried’ mental processes become and remain active
in the collective memory; myth is one such medium that establishes a connection between the
conscious and the subconscious.20 For this reason, Jung’s understanding of myth is dependent on
his understanding of archetype and symbol. Jung identifies reoccurring motifs of dreams and art
and other outlets of the subconscious as equivalent to those encountered in world mythologies
and fairy tales. Jung’s archetypal theory is compelling; that certain narratives and images occur
throughout human history and in widely separated mythologies hint to a “common psychic
heritage for mankind.”21 When this mythic heritage is lost or abandoned by its people, Jung
predicts nothing less than a “moral catastrophe,”22 since the foundational set of stories for any
culture constitutes its psychic life.23 The stories Jung observed as specific subconscious
expressions of his patients, and those found in the greater body of literature and religion, have
the common ultimate concern of establishing meaning.24 To live in a post-modern,
demythologized world is to live without a coherent life narrative, and to lose one’s sense of
history and significance. To live out ‘our myth’ is the way, according to Jung, to establish what

                                                                                                               
17
C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” Of Other Worlds:
Essays and Stories (Chicago, IL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994), 38.
18
Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, NY: Harper & Row,
1963), 1.
19
Jung 1984, 247.
20
Jung 1981, 180.
21
Wallace B. Clift, Jung & Christianity: The Challenge of Reconciliation (New York, NY: The
Crossroad Publishing Company, 1982), 58.
22
Jung 1981,154.
23
Clift 1982, 60.
24
Ibid., 59.
5  
 
ethical framework to value and serve.25 Humankind does not invent myths or archetypes, but
experiences them.
The myth or archetype of resurrection is significant to Jung, but not in the same manner it
is significant to a Christian theologian – namely that the Christian interprets the Resurrection as
the curative salve for the ‘problem of evil’. As Paul describes it in his first letter to the
Corinthians, “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”26 Jung took great issue with the concept
of a sovereign, autonomous godhead; the Jungian perspective therefore rejects the power of a
God to conditionally choose when and how to interact with humankind, and for this reason could
not assign the resurrection symbol the meaning of ‘divine victory over evil’.27 There must, for
Jung, be present the element of human choice. The meaning of resurrection, if it is to be an
archetype, must be ultimately rooted in the Self and not God.
It is one of Jung’s convictions that if there be a God, He has His own need for humanity –
more specifically, His need for human consciousness. It is our active, discriminating minds that
contribute to and form a functional, living world.28 This language of a ‘needful God’ is not
unique: William James suggests the power of human belief may “help God… to be more
effectively faithful to his own greater tasks”;29 Paul Tillich too conceives of a God divinely
incomplete without creation, where “[t]he world process means something for God” and “God
finds fulfillment only through the other.”30 In each of these cases, purpose – even the Divine
purpose – is rooted in the human experience.
The early Christian experience embraced the proclamation of the Good News, that the
God of Creation is the same as the God of Redemption; in psychoanalytic terms, the “ego’s
burden” no longer must be borne alone.31 Jung likens Jesus as Messiah to the hero of classical
mythology: he who returns from the Underworld as conqueror of Death to restructure and set
right the world of mortals. Though physically mortal himself, he stands outside the grasp of
Death as a stronger and more perfect Person. He is like Osiris, the dying and resurrected god, a

                                                                                                               
25
Ibid., 66.
26
1 Corinthians 15:54.
27
Clift 1982, 140.
28
Ibid.
29
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York,
NY: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911), 519.
30
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Welwyn: Nisbet, 1968), iii. 451.  
31  Clift  1982,  141.  

6  
 
symbol and, more so, a Jungian archetype for the potential completion of the self. For this
reason Jung associates man’s self-actualization, that higher awareness of the self, with feelings
of “timelessness, ‘eternity,’ or immortality.”32 The nature of psyche, though in many ways
hidden and inaccessible to us, is not physically bound to concepts of space and time, and because
of this, humans are not entirely subjugated to their own ruin. Here the resurrection becomes the
ultimate projection of indirect self-realization onto a Man whose spiritual authority offered
freedom from state, oppression, and death. By sharing in his suffering, death, and resurrection,
the risen Christ affords his witnesses a renewed sense of human dignity.

Resurrection as a Response to Suffering

Malinowski’s theory of myth fits well with both the Christ narrative and the religious
theories of Freud and Jung when he states “that the ideas elaborated by myth and spun out into
narrative are especially painful.”33 In the period closely following the crucifixion, the
experiences of the risen Christ were a reaction of the human consciousness to the nature of the
life and death of Jesus.34 It has been claimed, in a later development of psychoanalytic thought,
that belief in the resurrection can be viewed as a coping mechanism for the anxiety related to
death and dying; or more generally, “one of the major functions of religious beliefs [is] to reduce
a person’s fear of death.”35 Tillich, again, agrees by claiming, “The anxiety of fate and death is
most basic, most universal, and inescapable.”36 Evidence of death anxiety in Western culture is
obvious without much scrutiny: we lament the deaths of other living things, particularly human
life; we labor to delay aging and death and spend considerable sums of money to do so, in fields
both medicinal and aesthetic. Following death, the customary method of North American burial
involves embalming, a practice interpreted by one modern sociologist as a “refusal to accept

                                                                                                               
32
Jung 1984, 249.
33
Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays (Whitefish, MT:
Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 113.
34
Knight 1996, 160.
35
G. Groth‑Marnat, “Buddhism and mental health: A cross‑cultural comparative analysis.” In
Religion and Mental Health, ed. J. Schumaker (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992),
277.
36
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 42.
7  
 
death.”37 It is a desire relevant to the orthodox Christian understanding of the bodily resurrection:
humans invest much effort to keep our bodies alive and unchanged.

Spiritual or Physical Bodies: Is It Relevant?

Given the importance of the religious constructs of ‘immortality’ and ‘afterlife’, to what
extent is the presence of an eternal, material body (that is, as opposed to ‘pure’ spiritualism)
relevant to cognitive understandings of death? Biblically, none of the gospel writers give an
account of the resurrection itself, but rather the discovery of the empty tomb and a series of
appearances of the risen Jesus. Mark, curiously, is the only evangelist to leave out any evident
mention of resurrection appearances, though he still affirms them in the promise that Jesus will
go before the disciples to Galilee. As our earliest source, Paul emphatically pursues the centrality
of the resurrection and corroborates its authenticity with a listing of witnesses.38 He begins with
Peter as the first of many, then the twelve disciples, the five-hundred ‘brothers’ of the early
church, James, the apostles, and lastly Paul himself. Jung notes an experiential discrepancy in the
encounters of Paul and the other witnesses, since Paul seems content to describe his encounter of
the risen Christ in terms of a vision, while others insist on the material physicality of Jesus’
presence.39 In one sense, it is true that the accounts differ in the presentation of Christ. Luke’s
account presents Jesus as hungry, and after asking for food, “[t]hey gave him a piece of broiled
fish, and he took it and,” to exaggerate his tangibility and confirm the reality of his resurrection,
“ate in their presence.”40 The Paul of Acts, when recounting his own conversion to King
Agrippa, refers to his experience of the resurrected Jesus as a “heavenly vision”41 in the form of
a great, blinding light.42 This difference, however, seems to be more a difference in literary
description than conception. To contend with Jung, Paul’s experience of Christ, though not in a
straightforward bodily form as with Luke, was certainly to be interpreted by his audience as

                                                                                                               
37
Philippe Aries, Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 99.  
38
See 1 Corinthians 15:3, 14, 22 and 15:5-8, respectively. Unless otherwise noted, all Biblical
references are taken from the New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
39
Jung 1984, 248.
40
Luke 24:41-43.
41
οὐρανίῳ ὀπτασίᾳ
42
Acts 26:13-15.
8  
 
physical – physical enough to blind him. Both accounts are considered, after all, to be compiled
by the same author. Modern neurological research substantiates Paul’s claim and bridges the gap
between the material resurrected body and the vision- or dream-like elements of the witnesses’
experiences: electrical stimulation of the visual and auditory cortexes produces ‘real’ visual and
auditory experiences. In other words, visions originate in the same visual-association areas of the
brain as common seeing.43 Paul himself saw no fundamental difference of experience between
his conversion on the way to Damascus and any of the other so-called “bodily” appearances
listed in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul in fact took issue with the Corinthians over their dualistic
approach to σῶµα and πνεῦμα, from which they belittle the body and revere the spirit.44 From
his viewpoint, there is no dissociation between body and spirit, and therefore resurrection
without a bodily form is impossible. Thus the body must be transformed: though the next life is
uninhabitable without a body, the earthly body is not fit for the resurrection life.45

The Interpretative Nature of the Gospel Narratives

A brief comparison between the synoptic gospel accounts reveals some obvious
discrepancies. The discovery of the empty tomb in the Gospel of Mark depicts the women
meeting “a young man, dressed in a white robe,”46 and the women, overcome with fear, did not
immediately share the man’s revelation with the other disciples. Matthew’s account identifies
this young man as “an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven,” whose appearance was far
more dramatic, “like lightning, and his clothing white as snow.”47 Luke doubles the one man to

                                                                                                               
43
Craffert 2009, 145.
44
An opposing theory assumes the Corinthians’ denial of a future resurrection to be a result of
the rejection of any life after death. See De Jonge 2002, 36.
45
J. Delobel, “The Corinthians’ (Un-)Belief in the Resurrection,” Resurrection in the New
Testament: Festschrift J. Lambrecht, eds. R. Bieringer, V. Koperski, & B. Lataire (Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2002), 349.
46
Mark 16:5. Though Mark describes the visitor as a ‘young man,’ the context of his appearance
shows that Mark likely interpreted the man as an angel rather than a human. His white robe is a
feature shared with Matthew, who explicitly defines the man as angelic; he sits symbolically on
the right side of the tomb which, in accordance with Old Testament precedence, is a position of
divine power and authority, a source of help, direction, and judgment (See Psalm 16:8, 17:7,
20:6, and many other psalms; Isaiah 41:10, 48:13; Habakkuk 2:16); and the women, already
worried about how to enter the tomb, are surprised to find a single man waiting inside, having
already removed the “very large” stone with the apparent strength of many men.
47
Matthew 28:2-3.
9  
 
“two men in dazzling clothes.”48 With Luke also the women share the entire revelation at the
tomb with “the eleven and to all the rest.”49 In terms of historical relevancy, none of these
differences are necessarily important. Stories written of a critical event often grow as they are
retold, and these gospel stories were not transcribed, at least in the current form we have them,
for some forty to fifty years after the resurrection experiences.50 The gospel narratives are
accepted as a mixture of history and archetype,51 though this view should not affect the function
or significance of the gospels as the foundation of Christian origins. Rather, these differences are
the consequence of the individual interpretations of the evangelists concerning the nature of
Jesus’ resurrection. Each synoptic gospel contains a unique theological understanding of the
event; Mark, the first of these, does not delay in making explicit his theological intentions for
“the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”52 Though differing in theological emphases and
interpretations, each Gospel author formed his composition with the specific purpose of sharing
the good news of Jesus of Nazareth as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah and the Son of God,
whose death and resurrection altered the fate of human life in both this world and the next.53
The consequence of viewing the gospels as theological expressions of their authors
necessarily makes them psychological expressions as well; our questions are no longer just
historical in nature (i.e., did Jesus’ resurrection appearances occur throughout Galilee, in
Jerusalem, or not at all?) but “about the motivations and convictions of the evangelists
themselves; they are questions about the challenges which the writers of the gospels deliberately
put to their readers – including ourselves.”54 It is certainly significant then that the evangelists
consciously chose to depict the gospel characters struggling to make sense of the truth and
implication of the resurrection. Neither the men on the road to Emmaus, nor the disciples fishing
at daybreak, nor Mary Magdalene, those who knew Jesus intimately during his incarnation,
recognize him in his altered state. In Luke’s account, the startled and terrified disciples mistake
Jesus for a disembodied ghost. The apostles do not believe Mary’s initial testimony of her vision,
and in John Thomas too requires proof; the disciples know their encounters of the risen Christ
                                                                                                               
48
Luke 24:4.
49
Luke 24:9.
50
Perrin 1977, 2.
51
Ibid., 12.
52
Mark 1:1.
53
Perrin 1977, 4.
54
Perrin 1977, 6.
10  
 
are incomprehensible in the context of common human experience.55 In an attempt to understand
the nature of the resurrection and its future implications, Paul wrote of the resurrected body as a
seed, saying, “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor,
it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is
raised a spiritual body.”56 Paul employs the seed to show the discontinuity between the old body
that was ‘sown’ and the new body that was raised; in other words, the physical body comes to
the end of its previously known existence, and the resurrected body is no longer in the same form
as that which was ‘sown.’57 God enacts the life of the new body as a sovereign transformation for
the creation of “a solidity of progressive, purposeful flourishing in fullness of life.”58 Nancy
Clasby has made the attempt to impose the idea of Jungian subconscious onto Paul’s theology.
She redefines the unique glory of resurrection as the archetypal expression of the progression of
human life drawn into a single brilliant focus, as can be seen in Mark’s portrayal of Jesus’ own
Transfiguration.59 Jung and much of the psychoanalytic community view the resurrection of the
body as an expression of the glory of human transfiguration and, as such, the spiritual potential
latent in humanity. The focus of psychoanalysis is in the raising of man’s πνεῦμα as opposed to
the Christ. For Paul of course, the act of resurrection replaces the egoist self, the ἐγώ, with
Christ, and Divine action is the only cause able to bring about continuity between the present
human life and the resurrection life.60

Visions and Reductionism

The biblical accounts exhibit dreamlike and mythological characteristics reminiscent of
Jung’s theory of visionary rumour.61 Initially developed as a psychoanalytic tool for UFO
sightings, ‘archetypes of the collective unconscious’ are projected from the psyche of individuals

                                                                                                               
55
Nancy Tenfelde Clasby, God, The Bible, and Human Consciousness (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 193-202.
56
1 Corinthians 15:42-44.
57
Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 1271-1276.
58
Ibid., 1272.
59
Clasby 2008, 199.
60
M. E. Thrall, “Paul’s Understanding of Continuity Between the Present Life and the Life of
the Resurrection,” Resurrection in the New Testament: Festschrift J. Lambrecht, eds. R.
Bieringer, V. Koperski, & B. Lataire (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 295, 300.  
61
Ibid.
11  
 
or groups and can produce grandiose visions. Regardless of whether Jung’s visionary theory is
comprehensive or sound, it does highlight a preexisting pattern from psychoanalytic case study:
“[I]n certain unusual mental states, especially at times of great stress or need, there occur visions
of a dreamlike character, containing imagery which reflects that of ancient and primitive
mythology, and which may be a vehicle for an experience of the numinous.”62 In an effort to
demystify the visionary experience, some psychologists consider the ‘reality’ of the resurrection
and the ‘consciousness’ of the witnesses to be culturally constructed entities,63 implying visions
to be but one mode of perception among the senses for cultures choosing to recognize them, a
mode half-forgotten and repressed in our ‘modern’ age. Residual evidence of this can be seen in
the fringes of societies, in the third world or undeveloped regions, and in ancient and, to a lesser
extent, modern religious testimony; in other words, visions are an individually and culturally
specific approach to the experience and perception of reality.64 While this approach offers an
empathetic and culturally sensitive view of antiquity, it devalues contemporary society for
somehow having ‘lost’ its ability to procure and exploit the visionary experience.

The historian who is able to acknowledge the influence of these psychical mechanisms in
the resurrection appearance accounts is perhaps better equipped to account for their formation.
Psychology is not so much an alternative approach to biblical scholarship as it is a
methodological complement. The introduction of psychological phenomena to the resurrection
encounters need not reduce it to ‘mere’ psychology; a psychological explanation does not assume
the psyche to be the only contributing factor, nor must it negate the meaningful religious essence
of the experience. Skeptics accused Jung of similar psycho-reductionistic tendencies, though he
vehemently denied the allegation:
Psychology is spoken of as if it were 'only' psychology and nothing else. The notion that
there can be psychic factors which correspond to divine figures is regarded as a
devaluation of the latter. It smacks of blasphemy to think that a religious experience is a
psychic process…. How do we know so much about the psyche that we can say 'only'

                                                                                                               
62
Knight 1996, 160.
63  Craffert 2009, 145.  
64
Klaus Berger, Historical Psychology of Identity and Experience in the New Testament, trans.
Charles Muenchow (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 96-103.  
12  
 
 psychic? For this is how Western man, whose soul is evidently 'of little worth', speaks
and thinks. If much were in his soul he would speak of it with reverence.65
The earliest disciples are not condemned to be delusional psychotics through the
acknowledgement of the psychological mechanisms present in their religious experiences. As
Christopher Knight commented, this distaste for the socio-theological likely develops from an
aversion to the ‘merely’ human;66 many phenomena we call ‘occult’ or ‘paranormal’ in
modernity were familiar and accepted experiences in antiquity.67 Yet Jung followed in his
detractors’ tradition by explicitly christening the resurrection accounts as historically suspicious,
though from a psychological perspective this is not only unnecessary for the production of useful
theory, but also serves to condemn the utility of its broad religious significance. Jung reduces the
resurrection to “vain… expectation of the immediate parousia, which has come to naught.”68
More specifically, to approach an amorphous spiritual reality only through the context of “crude
and tangible ’miracles’” was to Jung the only route for the “uneducated and rather primitive
population” of Jesus’ day.69 For Jung this was nothing less than a devaluation of the spirit, as if
the soul, man’s very being, has no independent existence from the material. For obvious ethical
and ecumenical reasons, Jung’s wandering into the establishment of religious truth – the
fictionalization of the resurrection - is not within psychological jurisdiction. The imposition of
strict ‘rationalism’ on the supposedly implausible tends to obscure accurate historical
reconstruction. Rather than make clear the socio-psychological nuance of the Biblical authors, to
imply that the evangelists are somehow ‘less evolved’ serves only to impose a modernist schema
upon ancient circumstance.70 Jung, at least in theory, agrees; in response to a letter asking
whether he “ignore[s] the importance of other disciplines,” Jung states that, “Psychology to me is
an honest science that recognizes its own boundaries, and I am not a philosopher or a theologian
who believes in his ability to step beyond the epistemological barrier.”71 In many ways, a social-

                                                                                                               
65
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy: Collected Works XII (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1979), 9.
66
Knight 1996,160.
67
Berger 2003, 100.  
68
C. G. Jung, “On Resurrection,” Psychology and Western Religion, trans. R. F. C. Hull
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 248.
69
Ibid.
70
Berger 2003, 100.
71
Jung 1984, 260.
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scientific perspective should approach the textual data of the visionary encounters as evidence
for the reality of Jesus’ resurrection as a cultural event without any need to claim universal
‘historic’ validity.72

Conclusion: Integration
Freud describes in a particular essay how a client, prior to psychoanalysis, nursed his
father through a long and painful terminal illness. In the months following his father’s death, the
man reported having a repetitive dream in which “his father was alive once more and that he was
talking to him in his usual way. But he felt it exceedingly painful that his father had really died,
only without knowing it.”73 Freud, as expected, interprets his patient’s dream as a product of
guilt: the dream speaks of the dreamer’s recent desire that his own father die at last to end his
suffering, all the while still harboring murderous intents from his infantile Oedipus complex. But
to examine the dream again under a more hopeful Jungian lens potentially returns to similar
Gospel ideations of resurrection. The death of an object for Jung does not denote the end of its
psychological life. Rather, “it is only after the corpse of a loved one is buried that we may
directly experience the image through which that person has been an experience for us.”74 All
men ‘resurrect’ in the psyches of their intimates, and here one can clearly recall the image of the
empty tomb whose ‘loved one’ has gone missing. The end result for the gospel authors and Jung
coincide, that “psychic images are as real and worth talking to after the deceased’s incarnational
life as they were during it.”75 Much of Christianity has emerged from such visionary experience,
though always as a private, intimate phenomenon reserved for disciples and friends.76

To return to my original question, must these christophanies be reduced to psychological

hallucination? The only appropriate response is from the perspective of each evangelist, for

                                                                                                               
72
Craffert 2009, 140.
73
Sigmund Freud, “Formulations Regarding Two Principles in Mental Functioning,”
Unconscious Phantasy, ed. Riccardo Steiner (London: Karnac, 2003), 73.
74
G. Mogenson, “The Resurrection of the Dead: A Jungian Approach to the Mourning Process,”
Journal of Analytic Psychology 35 (1990), 319.
75  Ibid.  
76
H. J. De Jonge, “Visionary Experience and the Historical Origins of Christianity,”
Resurrection in the New Testament: Festschrift J. Lambrecht, eds. R. Bieringer, V. Koperski, &
B. Lataire (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 35.
14  
 
whom the reality of the risen Christ was not just mere spiritual survival, but a physical event.
Though Mark, for example, does not offer his readers explicit appearance narratives as the other
gospel writers, such demonstrations are not necessary. The messenger in white directs both
women and audience ahead into Galilee where the appearances exist outside the myth itself, as if
in implication that anyone may bump into the risen Jesus on their travels. For the uneasy and
discouraged disciples, the message relayed by the women implies a promise of hope and
renewal, all the more moving for being left unsaid. The promise made makes it plain that the
body of Jesus was not gone by passive removal but emptied by Jesus’ own volition,77 whose
extant psyche was still contained in a body and actively participating in the lives of his followers
on earth. It is to the profit of theologians that psychology can interpret implications of the
resurrection without the need to confirm or deny the historicity of the New Testament, though
the opposite is also true; psychology makes a sharp weapon for the biased, the ethnocentric, and
the cynic.

                                                                                                               
77
France 2002, 680.  
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